CSS Is Crap - the Sequel (Trequel? Trefoil? Trinity?)

So I bitched on here before about how I thought that CSS was total and utter crap. A design quagmire, built by committee, polished by someone with syrup all over their hands, and implemented by the most batshit of batshit inmates in the asylum.

Lots of people didn't agree with me. So I offer you a challenge:

Recently I rebuilt the X-Ray Kid Software website. (I'm in round 2 of rebuilding it right now so that the layout can handle longer pages).

Here's the requirements for it, although it's probably easier to look at the site itself:

  • Single column design, which must be able to contain a variety of column layouts (check out the main page and the team page for examples)
  • The main column must be centered on the page.
  • A footer must appear at the very bottom of the screen, expanding the container above it down to meet it (for the background image)
  • If the content + footer is longer than the window, the footer should appear at the bottom of the page, and the page should scroll. The footer must remain flush with the bottom of the browser window even after scrolling.
  • The background image must appear as shown on the site; it's positioned relative to the main, centered column.
  • Most content is in the form of blocks in the main panel which have a stretch area in the middle, rounded corners, and an image based title (or potentially buttons in the footer of the blocks).
  • Nav bar must be aligned to the right, at the top of the column, and must be baseline aligned with the logo's major axis.
  • Must work in all major browsers - Chrome, Opera, IE6, IE7, Firefox 2, Firefox 3.

I must admit, I wussed out on this one. I wanted to do it all as tables, but that wasn't going to work. Then I tried all CSS, and that didn't want to work either. So the result is the bastard child of CSS and Tables. And then comes the footer, which is all handled with Javascript. It's certainly not perfect, but it works. The new version I'm putting together works even more consistently.

I dare you to do this entire site using nothing but CSS, and still have the HTML document be readable.

Now, if I was implementing HTML & CSS from scratch, I'd have implemented this completely differently. It shouldn't take 3 or 4 days of experimentation in different browsers, rebuilding graphics, messing with combinations of styles, reparenting DIV hierarchies etc to make this kind of a site. There's nothing to it really. Back in the day, I would have put together that site like this, which would take less than a couple of hours to put together. But the demands of a modern website don't allow you to get away with something that is as unpolished as that.

I've had a website up online since 1994 (one of the first homepages on the net, and one of the few that has been consistently online since then). Sure, the URL has changed occasionally as its moved from server to server, but it has been there.

And you know what? Web development today is actually exponentially more difficult than it was back then.

Why the hell is that the case? Software's supposed to get more refined and work better over time. Not worse. Admittedly, we're asking a fair bit more of it today, but frankly, the whole system needs an overhaul.

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#technology, #web development
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New XBOX Dashboard Experience Is A Legal Nightmare

... and by Legal Nightmare, I mean that I'm going to have nightmares because of the sheer unadulterated length of the EULA you need to accept before you can use the service.

It goes on for PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES and PAGES ...

... well, you get the rough idea.

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#technology, #Games, #legal, #microsoft, #xbox
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Toshiba Laptop Recovery Blank Screen

So I got a new laptop today (my old one is dying; the hard drive has bad blocks, so rather than just buy a new hard drive, I decided to get a swankier model and give away the old laptop as a gift once I've had some time to sit down and repair it).

Unfortunately, the only one that BestBuy could sell me was one which already had been mutilated by the Geek Squad. Given that I have no idea what they did to it, it's off to System Recovery land to explore and find out.

Unfortunately, every time I tried a Recovery and then booted up, it failed. It'd get through the progress bar screen, and then stop working.

Safe mode? It'd stop after loading crcdisk.sys.

Four different attempts (and several hours of messing around later), I finally got it to work.

I took out the flash card that was in the drive.

Motto of the story: If you're doing a recovery and it doesn't work, make sure you've not got any PCMCIA cards, flash cards, USB thumb drives or anything else like that plugged in which aren't part of the original system.

It's either that which fixed it or the Startup Repair option (first one in the list when you do a System Recovery, not a Toshiba Recovery).

*sigh* It really shouldn't be this hard. Still, hopefully this will solve the problem for a bunch of other people out there who were seeing the same thing. Worth a shot before you start deleting driver files at least...

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Vista Image Backup

So, my laptop has Vista Home Premium, and I'm starting to get bad sectors... so tomorrow is a Fry's trip day.

However, I'm sorely annoyed at the limitations in the backup as disk image technologies available to me.

Vista's Backup System

Vista has a built-in backup system. I'm running Vista Home Premium. This backup system will only backup my files; it won't create a backup image. Epic Fail.

To get the full-on disk imaging backup, apparently I need to upgrade to Vista Ultimate Edition. $139. That's pathetic. So on to my next option...

Norton Ghost

Ah, Ghost, how I loved thee. Your ability to create a boot disk I could use to backup pretty much any system as an image was legendary.

Unfortunately, the latest version (which works with Vista) no longer offers me that option. It runs while the system is up and running, backing up in the background using the Windows Shadow Volume Service to do its magic.

And it does so - on my work machine at least - while soaking up nearly all my CPU time and hanging.

Ugh.

So now I have to find something else to do the business. Wish me luck.

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